Essays - Second Series Author:Ralph Waldo Emerson A collection of essays: The poet, Experience, Character, Manners, Gifts, Nature, Politics, Nominalist and realist & New England reformers. Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 ? April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the early 19th century. His teachings directl... more »y influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid 1800s, while he was seen as a champion of individualism and prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. As a result of this ground breaking work he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence"« less